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      ‘My Father’s Dragon’ Review: Apocalypse Howl

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      A boy befriends a colorful creature in this animated film that struggles to maintain a consistent tone.With its expressionistic, skillfully lit pastels, “My Father’s Dragon” appears, at first, to be a high-tier cartoon for young sophisticates, as one might expect from the Oscar nominee Nora Twomey, who previously directed “The Breadwinner.” Enter the dragon, Boris (Gaten Matarazzo), who promptly shoves a blocky paw into his armpit and squeezes out an air fart.For better and worse, Meg LeFauve and John Morgan’s freewheeling adaptation of Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 children’s novel keeps the title and scant else. This tale opens on a boy named Elmer (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), whose cloyingly idyllic childhood collapses when his mother (Golshifteh Farahani) goes broke, forcing the pair to move to a grim tenement in the city. The excitement doesn’t start until the second act when Elmer ventures to Wild Island to steal Boris, calculating that a dragon exhibit could salvage the family fortune. However, the island’s fanciful inhabitants — rhinos shaped like lozenges, baby crocodiles who resemble purple-eyed paisleys — have been convinced by a blustering gorilla (Ian McShane) that Boris must remain in their servitude to prevent their fragile homeland from sinking into sea.The film’s mix of tones is as wild as its setting. In one moment, the story insightfully explores the emotional turbulence of characters who feel pressured to pretend that everything is under control even as they suspect they’re hurtling toward catastrophe; in another, an over-caffeinated whale (Judy Greer) squeals “Yaaaaas!” It’s one part doom cloud, one part squirting prank flower — an uneasy balance that’s united only by stunning visuals which sweep the audience along even when the gags stumble.My Father’s DragonRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Sam & Kate’ Review: It’s a Family Affair

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      Darren Le Gallo’s drama stars two real-life parent-child duos — Dustin and Jake Hoffman, and Sissy Spacek and Schuyler Fisk — as lonely small-towners looking for love.“Sam & Kate” is the kind of film in which a car breakdown kindles a romance, fireworks provide the backdrop for a first kiss and a misplaced box (almost) ends a relationship.It’s a story about serendipity, except the signs from the universe that drive Darren Le Gallo’s film, a drama about finding love after loss, feel a little too … plotted. Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.If there’s a ring of truth to the film, it’s in the casting. The movie stars two real-life parent-child pairs: Dustin Hoffman and Jake Hoffman play a father-son duo, Bill and Sam, while Schuyler Fisk and Sissy Spacek appear as Kate and her mother, Tina. Sam is an aspiring artist who has returned to his hometown to take care of the ailing, cantankerous Bill; Kate, a bookstore owner, is grieving a personal tragedy (the details are revealed gradually) and trying to manage Tina’s hoarding problem.Sam asks Kate out and is gently turned away, but — per the fantasies of many a spurned man — he persists, and she finally gives in.Sam and Kate are such broad archetypes that it’s hard to feel the depth of their scars or the spark of their chemistry. The younger Hoffman’s messy hair and hangdog face do little to explain why, exactly, Sam is such a sad sack. The effervescent Fisk is mostly tasked with smiling sadly — until, of course, Sam draws Kate out of her shell with his supposed charms.The parents, however, fill out their thin roles with an authentic melancholy that “Sam & Kate” struggles otherwise to muster. Underneath Bill’s orneriness and Tina’s neuroses, one glimpses two aging actors confronting their own mortality with touching candor.Sam & KateRated R for crass language and some scenes of pot smoking. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More